Rock & roll and classical music have long been thought to go together like milk and vinegar, and such early attempts at bridging the gap – like Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra – have indeed been lamentable. Lately, though, the idea of uniting the two styles of music has been gaining more credibility, particularly in New York's new-music circles. In part an effort to move away from an overly academic mind set of serialism, this movement has pinned its hopes on a combination of minimalist aesthetics, rock technology and general New Wave daring. However, if these three recordings are any indication of where all this is heading, it may be a little early to hand out the manifestoes.

Philip Glass is the most obvious candidate for godfather of this new art music. From his minimalist opera Einstein on the Beach to the rock-edged works on his album North Star, Glass has frequently used such stock rock devices as repetition, heavy amplification and a reliance upon rhythm as a means of compositional development. As a result, his sound might be likened to Mozart as produced by Brian Eno–simple, scalar melodies and logically consonant modulations given an utterly blank, bare-bones treatment. The soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi, however, points out that eventually this intentionally simplistic approach becomes a compositional dead end. Because his minimalist approach limits itself rhythmically and melodically, Glass has only two options to avoid numbing repetition: playing with texture and expanding the harmonic scope a little. The former seems the better route, and as a result, the title cut gets good mileage from a growling basso chant of "Koy-aan-is-qat-si" against a cool organ arpeggio, while "Pruit Igoe" profitably resets some of Glass' basic ideas in an interesting arrangement for brass. But aside from such small-scale triumphs, there's little here that Philip Glass fans won't already have heard a few dozen times.

Still, Glass' minimalism has far more to offer than does Glenn Branca's fetish for harmonics and overtones. Although Branca's use of hyperamplified, exotically tuned electric guitars is potentially valuable, he has yet to make any truly significant music. Like such previous recordings as Lesson No. 1 and The Ascension, his Symphony No. 3 offers vast slabs of sound in which tonal colors shift ever so slowly. As it stands, it's a very tedious exposition of a basically limited idea.

While Branca and Glass have tried to bolster European art music with rock's technology and mannerisms, former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek has gone in the opposite direction, taking portions of composer Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and rearranging it for his own rock group. Manzarek is largely faithful to Orff's score and only occasionally slips in a jazzy solo or two. Yet even though he has enlisted Philip Glass as coproducer, the end result is little more than a classier equivalent of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's execrable Pictures at an Exhibition. (RS 410)

J.D. CONSIDINE